Britain Ends Self-Rule in N. Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process suffered a devastating blow Friday when Britain pulled the plug on Belfast’s fledgling power-sharing government and resumed direct control of the province after just nine weeks of self-rule.

Eleventh-hour negotiations and a last-minute proposal by the Irish Republican Army for getting rid of its guns failed to stave off the government suspension, which most people in Northern Ireland had dreaded and only sworn enemies of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement could celebrate.

The IRA’s bid offered some hope that the Protestant-Roman Catholic government might be resurrected before too long, although there were widespread fears that history was repeating itself. Twenty-five years ago, Northern Ireland’s first power-sharing government was suspended after a few months in office and never reconvened.

Leaders of both communities worry that if the suspension drags on too long, it will create a political vacuum that opponents of the peace process and armed dissidents will seek to fill.

Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson was somber as he made the announcement that he had hoped to avoid.

“I have decided to suspend the executive and the institutions,” Mandelson said, blaming the breakdown on the IRA’s failure to start decommissioning, as disarming is also known.

“We have got to clear up the issue of decommissioning once and for all,” he said. “It’s dogged the process throughout. It’s sapped confidence in the institutions.”

Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, accused Mandelson of caving in to blackmail from pro-British unionists in the province.

But the British government saw the suspension as a lesser of two evils in the face of threats by Ulster Unionist Party chief David Trimble to resign as first minister of the provincial government today, the unionists’ de facto deadline for disarmament.

The British government fears that if Trimble resigned, he might not be able to regain the position in another round of voting. The participation of Trimble, a Protestant moderate and leader of the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, is seen as key to the survival of any provincial government in Northern Ireland and to the success of the Good Friday accord.

Trimble said the suspension of the power-sharing government was sad but inevitable.

“We have taken risks, and others, I’m afraid to say, have not taken the same risks,” he said. “There can be no place in the politics of Northern Ireland for private armies and their guns.”

After months of deadlock and negotiations brokered by U.S. envoy George J. Mitchell in November, Trimble agreed to form a government with Sinn Fein before the start of disarmament. But to win unionist backing for his decision, Trimble promised to resign from the new Cabinet if the IRA had not taken its first steps by February. His party council scheduled a meeting for today.

The new government took power in December in what appeared to be the dawn of a new era of cooperation in Northern Ireland. Trimble took over as first minister with Seamus Mallon, a Catholic from the Social Democratic and Labor Party, as his deputy.

Sinn Fein took two seats in the 12-member Cabinet, including Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander in Belfast, as education minister. Even the Rev. Ian Paisley’s anti-agreement Democratic Unionist Party took up its Cabinet posts.

The former enemies set about solving local problems for farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs and health-care workers--the normal business of a normal government that Northern Ireland had craved so badly after 30 years of sectarian warfare that has taken more than 3,600 lives.

But the euphoria was to be short-lived.

The independent commission overseeing disarmament under the peace accord issued its determination Jan. 31 that the IRA had taken no action and given no information about when it would start handing over its weapons.

Mandelson responded by seeking legislation from the British Parliament to resume direct rule in Northern Ireland, although he delayed its implementation for several days to give the IRA more time to make a move.

The British and Irish governments negotiated with Sinn Fein in an effort to secure a statement from the IRA with at least a timetable for getting rid of its guns; at the same time, they pushed Trimble to accept such a statement in lieu of guns.

But the statement didn’t arrive in time, and Mandelson suspended the provincial government.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams reacted furiously.

“The secretary of state moved on the basis of a threat by the Ulster Unionist Party . . . to collapse the institutions in the knowledge that this major breakthrough was on offer,” Adams said.

Before the suspension was announced, President Clinton said he continued to hold out hope that the peace agreement would survive.

“We believe that all the requirements of the Good Friday accords which the voters of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic embraced should be fulfilled, and we hope a way can be found to keep this going,” Clinton said at the White House.

Within hours of the announcement, Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, head of the disarmament commission, issued a new report. He had met with an IRA representative Friday who laid out “the context in which the IRA will initiate a comprehensive process to put arms beyond use, in a manner as to ensure maximum public confidence.”

The new IRA statement, De Chastelain said, “holds out the real prospect of an agreement” that would bring about the disarmament called for by the 1998 accord.

The British and Irish governments said this was a significant statement, but a spokesman for Mandelson’s Northern Ireland office said it did not go far enough.

“One thing we have to talk about is the time scale for decommissioning. This is the ‘when’ question. They have to satisfy not just the two governments but also David Trimble,” the spokesman said.

Trimble’s party will meet as planned today, but his resignation is moot because he doesn’t preside over any government at this point.

The potential Catch-22 for resurrecting the provincial government is this: Trimble says he won’t go back to a government with Sinn Fein unless the IRA begins to disarm, but the IRA doesn’t want to agree to disarm unless Sinn Fein is sitting in government.

The British and Irish government will now begin a review of the peace process similar to the one undertaken in November. Mitchell has made it clear to both governments that he is not interested in returning for this latest crisis.

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Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and William Graham in Belfast, Northern Ireland, contributed to this report.